Ephemeral, yet immortal
This series of poetic essays fusing the natural history, stories and experience of some of our best-loved flowers is a tour de force, says Mark Griffiths
Literary botany The Brief Life of Flowers
Fiona Stafford (John Murray, £20)
THE ephemerality of some of our best-loved flowers has earned them immortality, led to their being perpetuated in memory, folklore, religion, literature and art and garlanded with values and meanings. We also preserve them physically, be it through cultivation and conservation or the capture of their assets, such as perfume and medicinal properties.
In other words, a vast span of human history resides in short-lived flowers. Add to it the natural history of the plants concerned and stories of astonishing richness result.
Fiona Stafford tells many of the best of them in her glorious new book, The Brief Life of Flowers, a more than worthy, floral successor to her 2016 triumph The Long, Long Life of Trees and, like it, developed from a series of talks originally broadcast on Radio 3.
With one exception, each of the book’s 15 chapters is an essay on a familiar flower that draws on an immense range of records, genres and disciplines, not least on Prof Stafford’s own academic field, English Literature. Here are the ‘lives’, in both biographical and biological senses, of, among others, primroses, daffodils, roses and thistles.
I’ve been delighted and educated by them all, but special mention must be given to the chapters on daisies, lavender, sunflowers and poppies. These are absolute tours de force, outstanding in their seamlessly elegant compression of a great deal of fascinating knowledge.
The only exception to this rich information concerns a plant about which there is, quite literally, vanishingly little to say: ‘Ghost Orchids grow under the cover of darkness, haunting hidden woodlands, evading all eyes. These rarest of British wildflowers may appear tomorrow, or they may never appear again.’
So declares the last chapter, which, at a paragraph long, appears to disappear, just like its phantom subject—a wonderfully witty, Tristram Shandytype conceit on which to end a book much occupied with evanescence.
Connecting these stories is Prof Stafford’s own. ‘I can measure my entire life in leaves and petals,’ she begins the first chapter, before revisiting her childhood and the gardens that were created by the book’s dedicatee, her mother Gill, who, happily, has handed on her ‘special relationship with flowers’.
Subsequent chapters open with the author’s experiences of the plants in question. These are related in passages of pure prose poetry, as when she describes the year’s hatching from egg-like snowdrops and recalls how, in the wintry woods around her teenage home, the ‘mass of white and mint green minispears’ was so dense ‘that it was hard to move without crushing the flowers, though if you ventured through they recovered at once, closing behind to keep the secret safe’.
Such personal evocations are rare in plant books and make this one all the more precious. They provide a beautiful and compelling counterpoint to the natural and social history and, sometimes, they’re of historical interest themselves.
At the very end, for example, in the last paragraph of the Acknowledgements, Prof Stafford pays tribute to her grandparents, who established Bradley Nurseries in north Lincolnshire on a site that had been intended for the house of her great uncle Harry. The author remarks that, although Harry’s premature death in 1924 meant that his house was never built, ‘the garden, designed by Gertrude Jekyll, was already growing and continued to thrive alongside the nursery business’.
Charming illustrations—some antique, others new—appear throughout, among them a ghost orchid conjured by the artist Malcolm Sparkes, who is also the author’s husband.
A flaring bouquet of field flora, Angie Lewin’s dust-jacket illustration is a lovely thing, too.
My hunch is that The Brief Life of Flowers will last long, evolving from perennial favourite to classic.